nd the other in
the forms of society, his vision of the divine order, the Intellectual
Beauty. 'Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in
which they appeared, were called in the earliest epoch of the world
legislators or prophets, and a poet essentially comprises and unites both
these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is,
and discovers those laws according to which present things are to be
ordained, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are
the germs of the flowers and the fruit of latest time.' 'Language, colour,
form, and religious and civil habits of action, are all the instruments
and materials of poetry.' Poetry is 'the creation of actions according to
the unchangeable process of human nature as existing in the mind of the
creator, which is itself the image of all other minds.' 'Poets have been
challenged to resign the civic crown to reasoners and merchants.... It is
admitted that the exercise of the imagination is the most delightful, but
it is alleged that that of reason is the more useful.... Whilst the
mechanist abridges and the political economist combines labour, let them
be sure that their speculations, for want of correspondence with those
first principles which belong to the imagination, do not tend, as they
have in modern England, to exasperate at once the extremes of luxury and
want.... The rich have become richer, the poor have become poorer,...
such are the effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of
the calculating faculty.' The speaker of these things might almost be
Blake, who held that the Reason not only created Ugliness, but all other
evils. The books of all wisdom are hidden in the cave of the Witch of
Atlas, who is one of his personifications of beauty, and when she moves
over the enchanted river that is an image of all life, the priests cast
aside their deceits, and the king crowns an ape to mock his own
sovereignty, and the soldiers gather about the anvils to beat their swords
to ploughshares, and lovers cast away their timidity, and friends are
united; while the power, which in _Laon and Cythna_, awakens the mind of
the reformer to contend, and itself contends, against the tyrannies of the
world, is first seen, as the star of love or beauty. And at the end of
_The Ode to Naples_, he cries out to 'the spirit of beauty' to overturn
the tyrannies of the world, or to fill them with its 'harmonizing
ardours.' H